After complaining about Sunday's football offerings, I ended up partaking in a few anyway. Damn you, free TV!
The early game here was as advertised,
SF@Chi. The Bears won, 17-9, and the game was even worse than expected, with a Chicago special; a howling, gusting wind that made forward passes and accurate field goals semi-impossible. And when you've got Kyle Orton (8-13, 67 yards, 1 INT) facing off with punt team specialist/emergency starter Cody Pickett (1-13, 28 yards, 1 INT), adding a high wind is just cruel and unusual punishment.
Seriously, when's the non-old school Nebraska football game you heard of with combined passing stats of 9-26, 95 yards, and 2 INTs? Good lord, those are like Payton Manning @ New England in the playoffs type stats. At least the SF QB had an excuse, what with him being the 4th stringer and not having played QB since college, going against one of the best defenses in the league. What's Orton's excuse, besides the wind? SF's defense is woeful, their offense can't sustain a drive so they give the other team plenty of opportunities, and Chicago was playing at home, albeit in a wind tunnel.
Anyway, I set that game to tape, though I couldn't imagine watching it. I didn't, at least not after I got up at noon and saw the score in the 4th quarter. Besides, the only good play, an NFL-record 108 yard missed field goal return, was on all the highlight shows. Chicago executed that play, after SF's suspect decision to try that FG into the incredible wind, as the first half was ending with them amazingly ahead, 3-0. The amazing thing is that SF still easily could have won, thanks to Chicago's horrible offense and special teams. Their punt returner fumbled twice and dropped another punt that SF recovered on the 2 yard line. Sure, TD there, right? Not for SF: 1 yard run, 0 yard run, 5 yard penalty illegal substitution, 5 yard penalty delay of game, incomplete pass, 4th and 10 and FG time. If you can't score from the 2 yard line after a fumbled punt, you really don't deserve to win. And happily enough, they didn't.
The best thing about that game was that it ended early, and CBS switched to the
Minn@NYG game then. That game had another NFL record, with Minn returning a kick off, punt, and interception for TDs. All of that was long over with by the late 4th quarter though, and when the game came on here NYG had the ball at the Minn 20, trailing 13-21. Eli Manning promptly forced a pass into heavy traffic over the middle, threw it behind his receiver, and it was deflected up for the 4th interception of the day. Minn capitalized on that by promptly losing yards three straight plays and punting with more than 3 minutes remaining, and at last the Giants weren't fooling around. They marched effortlessly down the field, throwing wide open 10 yard passes several plays in a row, rushing for easy gains, and soon found themselves with a firts down at the 4 yard line, and about 1:50 to play.
At that point the Giants' coaching went to hell. They spiked the ball then, even though they obviously should have been trying to run more time off the clock, even to the point of taking a knee or just calling a plunge into the line. Instead they stopped the clock, and then easily ran it in against the exhausted and demoralized Minn defense on the next play. They ran in the two point conversion too, tying the game, but with way, way too much time left. I smelled disaster, and the Giants made sure my nose was working by going into a rather insane blitz defense, allowing Minn to throw three straight short passes to uncovered receivers, who quickly dashed for 8 or 10 yards before diving out of bounds to stop the clock. It was really quite amazing, given that Minn had done nothing on offense all game, gaining just over 100 yards. They immediately rolled up 42 on
their last minute-and-a-half possession, almost all of it coming due to loose man-to-man coverage created by the Giants' insane defensive play calling. And when Minn's last second field goal sailed through and sent the Giants to a very painful home loss, I clapped and cheered, though I had no real rooting interest in the game. I just enjoyed seeing their stupid coaching appropriately rewarded.
The late game here was a surprise, with Denver@Oakland on TV, despite the TV listings promising Carolina's sure humiliation of the Jets. I didn't have much hope the Raiders would do any better, and they didn't. Malaya and I were working on home improvement, and moving things all around on the back deck, putting together a bike rack, rehabilitating plants, and so on. So though the game was on, we weren't paying much attention, and I don't know quite how
Denver manhandled them 31-17. It appeared to be classic Raiders football though, with lots of penalties, dropped passes, poor play calling, and a total lack of discipline, all set to the lusty boos of thousands of
fat, drunk, blue-collar guys wearing Kiss makeup and second hand hockey shoulder pads with tin cans glued to them. Denver was up 23-0 by the time we had the bikes covered by a tarp and the lawn furniture back outside, and with that much of a lead the requisite Broncos' 4th quarter collapse wasn't enough to do anything more than make the stats and final score a bit more respectible.
The night game was a sure fug-fest, so much so that even when we flicked it on and saw that Cleveland had scored early, I wasn't seduced into wasting VCR time taping it. Sure enough, the next time I looked Pittsburgh was up 27-7, (
they won 34-21), even with Charlie Batch at QB, and life's too short to spend much of it watching that sort of NFL action.
The best thing about the weekend? Atlanta losing at home to the previously 1-7 Packers, and the NYGs losing thanks to Eli's amazingly-inaccurate passes finally starting to find the other team, instead of just the astroturf. I mention those two things because of this:
DVOA Rankings, Week 10. I speak more specifically of the comments on that post, which number more than 650, largely thanks to disgruntled Atlanta Falcons fans objecting to the low placement of their formerly 6-2 football team. (See
the rankings here if the above link doesn't load. It's not for me now, probably because the sheer number of comments have broken their jerry-rigged comments script.)
It's amusing because the endless posts by Atlanta fans who chose to take the output of a computerized and completely objective ranking system as a personal insult. (Well, it's not actually objective; it's objective for each team, but the system as a whole was designed by humans who set the weighting for things like converting 3rd downs, scoring in the red zone, etc, and tweaking those values would change the results, though not in easily-predicted ways.) The Atlanta fans argued long and hard (and frequently incoherently) that the system was broken because Atlanta was ranked so low, even though 75% of that was due to the strength of schedule adjustment. And then Atlanta went out Sunday and lost, at home, to a 1-7 Green Bay team. And for once it wasn't entirely Vick's fault for putting up a 12-26, 3 INT type effort. Though you might blame him for being a thorougly mediocre passer (an improvement over his usual Sunday's work) and not doing a damn thing running the football, where he's usually colossal.
The other argument I saw made in the long, long, and now unviewable comments thread, and in another article last week on FO, was about Eli Manning. The Giants are winning and Eli the QB is getting a lot of the credit, despite the fact that his stats aren't actually very good. They were very odd though, since he's throwing an historically high percentage of incomplete passes, and yet had thrown very few interceptions. Some Giants fans were formulating explanations along the lines of, "He has a special skill for throwing the ball away when there's no one open, or throwing it where only the receiver can catch it if he dives for it." Needless to say, Eli's luck ran out Sunday, and he threw 4 INTs against the Minnesota defense, while putting up his usual sub-50% completion ratio.
It's possible to use advanced computerized ranking systems to predict future events in all fields. It's never a sure bet, but it's possible. For a surer bet, find examples of things that are greatly deviating from the mean, with no real sound reason to do so, and bet on them regressing. You'd have won money going against Atlanta and Eli's over/under INT stats this time, at least.
And yes, this sort of thing is always very obvious with hindsight.
